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For a whole different take on "community," I re-post a message from Steven Barry, the former Editor of the 90's-era publication, The Resister. It caused quite a stink back when first posted in early 2015, as it gave an opinion on "community" if the SHTF really did happen, and its eventual effects that many found offensive and contrary to modern "Patriot" thought (or visions of grandeur). I post here for food for thought, as some points are very valid...

Hope Is In The Past

Posted on January 30, 2015 | 87 Comments

Hope is in the Past
by
SFC Steven M Barry USA RET

BACKGROUND
This essay was requested by the administrator, “concernedamerican,” regarding the comments made by this writer on the post, “Quote of the Month,” and in particular Barry’s statement, “…trying to salvage something resembling community and rebuild something resembling a functioning society….”

The controversy was Barry’s objection that the Quote of the Month in question was taken completely out of context in defense of the Liberal ideology against which the quote’s author, Denoso Cortes, was in bitter enmity and damned in no uncertain terms. One response to Barry’s objection was (paraphrasing), “It doesn’t matter;” a perfectly Liberal response. Another objection was (paraphrasing), “Whose side are you on NOW?” A reference to Barry’s naïve defense of the Constitution in The Resister during the mid 1990’s. The full response to the second objection was this:

“’Side?’ The side of counter-revolution. Perfectly. So in response to the obvious question, ‘Which revolution?’ I answer: All of them.

I tell you all this. When SHTF, and you’re trying to salvage something resembling community and rebuild something resembling a functioning society, the last thing you will want among you is independent minded revolutionaries.”

INTRODUCTION

What is SHTF? For the purposes of this essay that is an important question. Financial and economic collapse is not SHTF. Government overreaching and onerous laws are not SHTF. Rebellious (government sponsored) minority uprisings are not SHTF. Martial law is not SHTF. Those things (and much more) are merely logical consequences of the Constitution. They are just a slow, steady, methodical, and systematic decline into chaos, barbarism and squalor.

Given all or some of those scenarios there will still be some semblance of society and there will still be (God help us) constitutional government.

There is an old principle of Scholastic philosophy; “The greater and more universal the effect, the more powerful and excellent is its cause;” and, “The cause always surpasses the effect somehow.” So if we now groan under the effect of insufferable laws that were all enacted constitutionally we needs look no further than the Constitution for their cause. An example: If one admits to “…freedom of speech, or of the press…” one has explicitly affirmed in principle that error has rights. And because “Truth is one, falsehood is multitudinous,” the inevitable consequence is that truth is swamped “in a deluge of error” to the ultimate conclusion that truth becomes “hate” or “insane” or something criminal. In other words, Jefferson’s error-has-rights “republic of ideas” is playing out perfectly. What was the model cause of the Constitution? The Declaration of Independence, which itself was an outright lie. But the causes go back much further and get more excellent (in the Scholastic sense) as we pass back through the “Enlightenment” (it enlightened nothing, but en-blightened just about everything), and back through the “Reformation” (it reformed exactly nothing – but it did deform an entire civilization), and back through the “Renaissance” (which renewed only paganism, and an ape of it at that) – and yet back further to the origins of revolution and “freethinking.” So for the purpose of this essay SHTF is not some grinding tiresome soul-crushing effect of a cause called the Constitution that is worshiped (there is no other way to put it) by Liberals and revolutionaries, whom include “conservatives” – who have never conserved anything — all of whom are actually pleased to call the thing “progress.”

Here, SHTF is restricted to two things; (1) catastrophic natural disaster on a continental scale to the extreme extent of societal collapse, and (2) WWIII, which necessarily results in societal collapse – albeit on a somewhat lesser scale. In both cases the Constitution is moot – both for those who use it and those who worship it — and constituted government authority (such as it is) and laws (such as they are) simply cease to exist.

In both cases it is not unlikely that within three to six months one half to 3/5ths of the population will be dead (that includes people reading this). There will be no infrastructure to speak of except hard things like roads (rail lines will become roads) and bridges, and buildings (which will be useful for little more that “mines” for material).

Agriculture will be dead. Husbandry will find domesticated animals feral if free range or dead if penned. Fuel non-existent (gas has a shelf life of six months). With luck SHTF will not hit in November. Preppers will find themselves in one of two conditions: Under siege until they are killed then looted, or looted after found dead. Those who remain somehow alive in cities will revert to cannibalism. There will be plague. There will be famine. “The living will envy the dead.” Pretty bleak.

But there is hope. Not in the future, but in the past. Not as in the 18th Century as some Utopians would have it. Rather, more in the 9th Century, or better, the 6th Century.

SALVAGING COMMUNITY & REBUILDING SOCIETY

The advantage people had in the 6th Century after the Western Empire faded into memory was that there was no SHTF. There was no dramatic “fall of the Roman Empire.” There was only an easing out of Roman administration by the Germanization of the Legions and centuries long “oozing” of Germanic tribes into the Empire. Throughout that whole period local community survived; only authority changed hands.

But, all the myths of “fall and collapse” aside, the subsuming of the Western Empire by the quasi-Romanized and mostly Christianized Germans did leave us with a model. That model is the establishment of 6th Century proto-Feudalism and its organic growth into 9th Century plus Feudalism properly so called. Yes; shocking as this proposition may be to the tender sensibilities of “rugged individualists,” post SHTF community can only be salvaged by Feudalism. (There were some “rugged individualists” – called Freemen – scattered about during the Feudal age; they were left unmolested in their small holdings; however, they had no rights because they had no obligations to anybody.) But in salvaging something resembling community in post-SHTF America, Americans have a huge problem: They have no concept of community whatsoever.

It would be a grave mistake to describe too minutely the formation of a community or the interdependence of its parts because that would give the picture of a mere effigy of a dreamy utopia, or press fit people into some insane imaginary model like Liberals attempt to do. An academic plan cannot be imposed on a population without confusion, chaos, ruin and the dehumanizing of the plan’s victims – like in the US today. Further, communities planned in real estate offices (remember Gritz’s and Lamb’s “Almost Heaven?”) or by denizens of redoubt phantasms (much like the “Identity” folks of the ’90s) are defective, misbegotten, abortive pipe dreams from their inception.

They all failed. All were well intentioned of course; based as they were upon “rugged individualism” and Constitutionalism. All fell into dissolution, division, and within themselves anarchy, because they were founded upon “rugged individualism” and Constitutionalism. Community cannot be based upon some political ideology; believing it can be so based is nothing other than Bolshevik delusion.

What then is community? The elementary cell, the bedrock, the corner stone, the foundation of community (indeed, society writ large), is the family. However, the individual family cannot support or sustain life for itself except in the most rudimentary form. In other words, a family cannot do everything for itself. It requires extension and the support and the aid of other families; more preferably (and most perfectly) of blood relation under one patriarch. There then is tribe. (Tribe is not, “Me and my gang.”) When lesser family tribes align with, are absorbed into or subordinated to a greater family tribe, there then is clan – under the head of one patriarch to whom tribal patriarchs are subordinated. Further, community requires cooperation. But “there is no cooperation without subordination” (another Scholastic principle). So, to whom are the familial, tribal and clan patriarchs to be subordinated? To the man with an army. Because the first principle of Feudal community is this: He who has an army will rule. And what is the purpose of this army? To protect the subjects (yes, I said subjects), meaning the tribes and clan patriarchs who swear personal loyalty to the man with the army for his protection for their people. Feudal society was a martial society and all loyalties were personal.

Here is the “how” of the establishment of proto-Feudalism in the 6th Century AD (and remember, this is where you have to begin; and they had it much easier in the 6th Century than you will have it). An army gains control over a region or province. The army commander, Duce (Duke = warlord) retains the province as his personal domain and reserves an estate for himself. He places his trusted retainers (Id est, subordinate commanders, “barons”) in control of the other estates. These estates contained a town or two of amorphous individuals (which is why they had to have a charter, “a special privilege,” to exist at all) and many villages that were mostly tribal in population. The barons in turn delegated Manors with their one or several villages to their subordinates, called knights. The estates and manors were called “Fiefs.” All the land of the province belonged to the Duce. Enfeoffment of estates to barons, and sub-enfeoffment of manors by barons to knights was contingent upon oaths of personal loyalty.

What about the families, tribes and clans that made up this community called manor or society called estate?

They were called serfs, and they “belonged” to whichever manor or estate. They were part of the property. Which is why, under primogeniture, the eldest son of a Knight or Baron or Duce inherited all “chattels” – movable (the serfs) and fixed (the Manor or Estate itself). And most importantly, the feudal society was rural and agricultural. Land was wealth. Even the serf had his small hold – which, by custom, became heritable. “Serf” sounds awful. But the reality is that the average serf in the 10th or 11th century had more personal liberty than the most rabid and anarchical “freeman,” who is a slave of “the law,” does today.

All well and good, Barry.

But what about SHTF?

And Barry answers, “Basically, you are screwed.”
Where are the families going to come from when divorce, contraception and abortion (the latter two are the same thing – it’s called murder of the innocent), result in a negative population “growth.” Where are your “families” when your (so very few and “intelligently” planned) spawn are smeared randomly across the face of the continent, themselves divorcing, contracepting and aborting themselves into extinction with “intelligent” planning? Whence patriarchal authority when “the people” are “sovereign?” (Just who are these “people?”) Tribe in America is a bad joke. Clan simply does not exist. Authority is a farce.

But there is a huge, and profoundly useless, mass of individuals – invariably Liberals, revolutionaries and “conservatives” – with which nothing can be done at all and for whom there is no hope. Except this: After SHTF, somebody who has an army is going to figure out what to do with the randomly scattered surviving “sovereign” blobs of “rugged individuals.”
Then you are back in the slave society of 6th Century BC. Which in post-SHTF America would probably be the best start back to something remotely resembling civilization.

I re-read this thread recently, and I decided to weigh-in, albeit late.

In my little mind, the past is a good gauge to the future. Using the past 80 years or so, we saw the rise of a dictator in Germany. The people of Germany were crapped-on by the rest of Europe after WWI. High taxes, a lack of food, and currency collapses set the stage for a strong, slick-talking man to promise the downtrodden a chance to rise up and become respected again. Socialism, in the form of national socialism, was to be the answer. Move forward to South Africa in 1994. The end of Apartheid. Enter Nelson Mandela, and Socialism. Venezuela and Chavez, socialism again

My belief of a post SHTF situation would look the same as the recent past. We already have a soft feudalism now with the banks and their minions, Congress, the courts and the executive branch controlling our standard of living and freedoms. Those who survive the initial catastrophe will need community to survive the aftermath of a nuke/EMP/pandemic/whatever. My bad dream is that as our leaders emerge from their bunkers, they will want to help us make our lives easier with, you guessed it, global socialism.

It's time to watch The Postman again. It had a happier ending, however we would have to amend the Constitution to allow Richard Starkey to be the President. He's a Brit you know